Monthly Archives: May 2016

In celebration of the warm weather, the Pre-Preppers have been making art inspired by nature. We started with clay ladybugs, moved on to butterfly masks, and then topped it all off with painted ponds. The ponds are still in progress and will soon include lily pads and frogs. We put the lily pads in today, so we’re one step closer to completion. My little friends are pretty excited about the frogs, so I’m sure Friday’s class will be a lively one!

Just like my Pre-Preppers, the Prepper class has been celebrating the coming of warm weather with some nature-inspired art! Each of my friends made their own clay ladybug to take home. They’d never worked with clay before, so it was a fun new experience. They followed up that activity with the making of butterfly masks. The masks are still in progress, but they’ll be done soon, and then we’ll be moving on to making ponds with lily pads and frogs.

Following the very exciting Splatter Paint activity, PreK has moved on to talk about how to draw different types of weather. We started off with rain, since it had a slight connection to the Splatter Paint. To make our rainy day pictures, we held our papers up and dripped watered down paint onto them so that it would fall down like rain droplets. Once the paint was dry, we also added cotton ball clouds. Our next project was a drawing of a windy day, followed by a sunny day with a rainbow! Now, we’re talking about how to make some of the animals we see outside on these nice sunny days. So far, we’ve covered how to draw birds and how to make them from Play-Doh. I was thoroughly pleased to see some students making pinch pots as nests for their birds as they waited for me to call out the next step.

The Kindergarten class has been working on end of the year review projects. It is a team assignment based on some of the elements of art. Each group got assigned a topic of Color, Line, Texture, or Shape, and then got a large sheet of paper to draw on. The goal was for each group to teach the class about their element. It was a fantastic team building activity, and the class really did well with being respectful during presentations and being supportive of their classmates’ hard work. I couldn’t have been more proud of them!

Recently, First Grade got a chance to name their splatter paintings from their Jackson Pollock activity. They named their work and shared with the class why they picked what they did. Most of the names revolved around the color choices and how they made a person feel. I was really happy to see them talking about what they imagined when they looked at the paintings. It’s good practice for deciphering more complex works later on. Afterwards, they started a group project for the different types of art. Each group was given a collection of terms and was asked to create a poster to help them teach the class about their topics. We had Impressionism, Pointillism, De Stijl, Cubism, Cityscape, Landscape, Seascape, Portrait, Self-Portrait, and Still Life. So far, we’ve seen two groups’ presentations and they did wonderfully! I look forward to seeing the next two tomorrow.

The Second and Third Grade classes have been working on posters to help teach the class about the different Principles of Art. Each student was assigned their own topic and asked to do four sketches of the Principle they were assigned. Then, we picked the best option and they got to draw it on a large sheet of paper. These will be used for presentations as soon as they’re done.

Like Second and Third Grade, the Fourth Grade class was assigned a final presentation on the Principles of Art. Each student got one topic and was asked to create a poster to help teach the class about that topic. The posters are still in progress, but they’re looking good so far!